Arcade fighting games were all the rage back in the early 90s. From Street Fighter II to Mortal Kombat, arcade rats were swarming to their local laundromats and arcades to play their favorite coin-op fighters. And then the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis were released. Now you could play your favorite arcade fighting games in your livingroom. Most of these were half-baked ports (I'm looking at you, Mortal Kombat for SNES.), but some of them were console originals, such as Acclaim's Justice League Task Force, Interplay's ClayFighter, and Konami's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters. On the historical day of October 28, 1994, Electronic Arts released a little game entitled "Shaq-Fu". It too was an original console fighting game. A fighting game that had Shaquille O'Neal as the mascot, so, of course, it sold like hotcakes. I have spent countless hours toiling through this unplayable monstrosity. An hour in and I became very irritable. Three hours in and I started crying. Five hours in and I began to get the shakes. And ten hours in I went into an uncontrollable fit of rage and hysteria and tried to drink a litre of bleach. After coming to my senses and calling poison control, I played for another hour or so. It was then that I knew I had had enough. It was time to review this flaming piece of dogshit. I will base my review on a score of 1-10. 1 being The Adventures of Bayou Billy, and 10 being Donkey Kong Country. I will also seperate the game into several sections, such as Characters and Story. Let's begin, shall we?
STORY: Hmmm.... where do I begin? Shaq stumbles upon a dojo (that has a shameless Pepsi ad on it) on his way to a basketball game. A basketball game for charity.... in Tokyo? Yep, and he meets this old asian guy that teaches him to prune bonzai trees, defend himself, and win the karate tournament in an awesome montage accompanied by the musical offerings of Joe Esposito. Shit, wait, that's the plot to Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City for SNES. Anyways, he meets this old man in the dojo who tells him to save a boy named Nezu. Shaq tries to tell the wrinkly old man that he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about, but then the old dojo man tells him there's no time to explain and with that, Shaq is whisked away into the "2nd world". Wait, what about the charity basketball game? Well, when Shaq doesn't show up, the rival team wins by default, and orders a bunch of hookers after the game. The Institution for Blind and Deaf African American Youth goes into bankruptcy and all the children end up as editors for GameSpot.com. A fate worse then death. Anyhoo, now Shaq has to fight a handful of evil and wacky characters to free Nezu.
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CHARACTERS: Street Fighter II had awesome characters such as Ryu, Ken, Blanka, Chun-Li, and M. Bison. Mortal Kombat had brutal characters such as Liu-Kang, Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Raiden, and Reptile. Shaq-Fu has characters like Kaori the strangely sexy catgirl. Beast, the unsettlingly satanic demon who probably belongs better in a Resident Evil game. Sett, the mean mummified motherfucker that unleashes his ancient kung-fu on unsuspecting children. Mephis, the plageurized fighter that looks like a poor man's version of Hobgoblin from Spider-Man. Voodoo, the half-naked, brown chick from the Amazon who loves rough sex and kicking ass. Okay, maybe I made up that first part. And, last and certainly least, Rajah, the stereotypical Arabian prince who looks like a generic enemy from Aladdin on the SNES. Only seven characters, wow. Wait, you can only play as Shaq in story mode?!? God damn it! You can only play story mode with the worst character in the whole game!?!
SOUND: The only good thing about the sound is the stereotypical asian karate sounds when you first put in the game.
MUSIC: ..... fuck it.
CONTROLS: Not only the worst controls in a fighting game, but maybe the worst controls in a video game ever. (Remember the controls in the abysmal Superman 64? Yeah, I try not to either.) The jumping mechanic is atrocious, and the hit detection is completely unreliable. You can hit an enemy from a screen away, and miss an enemy when your touching him. However, I love the names of the fighting moves in the game, (Shaq-uriken). There is no excuse for the terrible controls in this game.
GRAPHICS: Not exactly a saving grace for the game, but maybe the only decent thing about it. The characters move fluidly and hold stances as if they were actually using kung-fu. The jumping causes frame-rate issues, though.
OVERALL: A terrible game. There is no excuse for a game to be this bad. This just goes to show you that Nintendo's Official Seal of Quality was just a marketing tool. The game is absolutely no good. Electronic Arts should be ashamed of themselves for publishing this piece of crap. But the real blame should go to Delphine Software, the developers of this game. They also developed other terrible games such as Out of this World, a pseudo-3D adventure game for the SNES, and Moto Racer for the PC, an awful bike racing game from 1997. There's even a website dedicated to obtaining every single copy of Shaq-Fu and destroying all of them. But the worst part of this whole endeavor is that Shaquille O'Neal released an album two months after the release of this game, entitled "Shaq Fu: Da Return", featuring hits such as "Shaq's Got It Made"
, "Freaky Flow", and "Shaq-Fu: Stand and Deliver". The only optimism I can give is that we can all learn something from Shaq-Fu. Stereotypes are funny, and shameless marketing mascots don't make good video games. Except Cool Spot... Cool Spot kicks ass. Shaq-Fu gets a 2 out of 10.
Sincerely,
Mr. Retro
P.S.,
The URL for that Shaq-Fu destroying site is: shaqfu.com
There you can find the site's mission and how to contribute. You can also find a full visual list of all the characters here: http://shaqfu.com/characters.php
